Wireless communication local area networks have been increasingly widely used in recent years, especially combined with techniques in other fields in order to develop wireless control local area networks that meet different demands, bringing people great convenience. At the same time, however, these networks bring with them various requirements and problems.
For example, lighting systems controlled by wireless communication techniques have seen a major development in recent years. These lighting networks are usually centrally controlled, allowing a user to achieve various kinds of integral effects in real time by controlling respective nodes. An important feature of such a lighting network is that the data transmission rates between a console and respective nodes are asymmetrical, usually there are only one or very few consoles but a large number of nodes.
The conventional technique is to connect a console and the plurality of nodes by cables to form a network, but this causes many difficulties in installing, debugging, and maintenance of the network. Nowadays, wireless communication is used to replace cable connection, thus avoiding the problems caused by the use of cables.
In such a remotely controlled lighting network, one of the key factors is that the console needs to allocate a specific channel to each of the nodes in the lighting network, so that each node can communicate with the console via said specific channel for displaying and updating a specific content in real time. Another key factor is that the specific content communicated between each node and the console should correspond to the physical location of respective node, so that the nodes can cooperate with each other to achieve an integral display effect.
Where connections between the nodes and the console are realized by cables, the specific network addresses (channels) can be easily allocated through the physical connection relationships of the nodes, so the above requirements can be easily met. In a wireless communication system, however, the respective nodes are mutually independent, and the console cannot automatically determine the physical locations of the respective nodes, so the correspondence between a specific channel and the physical location of a node cannot be automatically obtained, which is an inconvenience in the use of the wireless communication technique.
With respect to the above-mentioned problem, the present way of establishing correspondence between a channel of a node and the physical address of the node is, in general, to manually record the physical locations of the respective nodes and then allocate a specific channel to each of the nodes. In a lighting network with wireless control, this is the usual method of enabling the console to control the nodes accurately and to achieve the integral display effect set by the console. However, this method involves a great workload, a complicated execution process, a long execution time, and a high error rate. Especially if the number of nodes is very large, it will become very difficult to allocate a respective channel to each node in this way.
The above problem is typical in remotely controlled lighting networks. In fact, the same problem exists in other fields of control through wireless communication. In a remotely controlled inductor network, for example, the physical location of a node corresponding to an inductor is also manually recorded at present, and a specific channel is allocated thereto based on said record so as to link the specific channel of each node to the physical location thereof. If there is a large number of inductors present, the above-mentioned difficulties are inevitable.